Wanted: A new manager. Key target: Regular Champions League football. Probable penalty for failure: P45. Budget: The sixth highest in the Premier League.

It is the job spec that does not quite add up yet it can be safely assumed that there will still be no shortage of applicants contacting Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy over the coming days. From their new training ground to an underachieving but high-quality squad, Spurs are a club who do genuinely have much to offer.

The biggest challenge for the next incumbent, however, will be to firmly realign expectations and aims with the cold reality of the Premier League landscape. That reality can be quickly understood with a glance at the balance sheets of the major clubs.

In terms of revenue and wage spend, Tottenham still lag behind their main rivals for Champions League football. Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City are virtually out of sight financially while even Liverpool, who are the next closest to Spurs, still have £25 million more each and every year to spend on their squad.

To put it another way, according to the most recent Deloitte review of football finances, Tottenham’s fiscal firepower is actually closer to that of Aston Villa, Fulham, Everton, Newcastle United and Sunderland than any of the four Premier League clubs who were in the hat on Monday for the Champions League draw. Yet it is against these clubs that Spurs managers are now judged.

In one sense, of course, the ambition of Levy and owner Joe Lewis should be applauded. There is a culture of expectation at Spurs that has become tangible right the way from the boardroom through to the dugout, dressing room and a restless fan-base. It is sensible to aim high and there is still no reason why Champions League football should not be achievable for Tottenham in an exceptional season.

Levy has certainly been astute in the transfer market and his negotiations, as again shown this summer in the world-record fee for Gareth Bale, have also helped provide his managers with a spending power in transfer fees that does sometimes outstrip their rivals.

This pressure that is put on managers may indirectly have spurred the club to relative short-term success but, for real long-term gain, it must surely be accompanied by greater perspective. Villas-Boas himself even seemed to buy into the premise that Spurs should expect regular Champions League football yet it made little logical sense.

The only way this could change is if the stadium issue was resolved or if Lewis or some other investor was to unexpectedly fund the benefactor model we have seen at Chelsea and Manchester City. Without that, it is hard to see how Villas-Boas’s successor will exceed the performance of recent Tottenham managers.

In the past seven years under Martin Jol, Juande Ramos, Harry Redknapp and Villas-Boas, Spurs have finished in the top five of the Premier League on five occasions. There has been a trophy in the League Cup, three other Wembley appearances in the FA Cup and League Cup and three quarter-finals in European competition.

That has all been achieved while balancing the books, building a new training ground and, from Michael Carrick and Dimitar Berbatov to Luka Modric and Gareth Bale, regularly selling the club’s best player.

Following that will not be easy and the danger of all this heightened expectation is that a damaging ambience of negativity will again descend before anything has really gone too wrong. Once that happens, arresting the slide can be very difficult.

Managerial sackings occur for many reasons beyond simply results and justifiable concerns had surfaced over Villas-Boas’s recent performance, particularly in his handling of Hugo Lloris’s head injury and his thin-skinned reaction to inevitable criticism.

It all began to feel reminiscent of how Villas-Boas seemed locked in a downward spiral of negativity during his final weeks at Chelsea and suggested that, whatever he might have learned from that experience, it was not how to manage the public mood during moments of difficulty.

Tottenham, after all, were still seventh in the table when the axe fell and it was only seven months since Villas-Boas had led the club to their highest-ever Premier League points tally.

In terms of pure results, though, it remains Redknapp who can feel the most aggrieved of Levy’s nine permanent or temporary managers since 2001. Redknapp guided Spurs to the top four twice in his three completed seasons at the club. In the other, Tottenham finished fifth and reached the Champions League quarter-final after wins against AC and Inter Milan. It was still not sufficient.

Redknapp, of course, suffered the double blow last year of also failing to land what many have called ‘the impossible job’ with England. Yet looking back, he may already have had it at Tottenham.